Basically, I split up my large backups into 1G chunks as, originally, I was keeping them on FAT32 disks. Not any longer but it's nice keeping things in smaller pieces, in case I need to burn to DVD, etc.

I recently had a filesystem corruption on my /home filesystem. I attribute this XFS filesystem failure to faulty memory that I had for a couple of weeks before I diagnosed it with GCC crashing, as can be seen in other posts in this forum

Whilst the /home filesystem was catastrophically corrupted (eventually), two other filesystems also had problems but xfs_repair was able to deal with them.

Luckily, I keep various filesystems separated, rather than what appears to be the current standard of everything in root, as only my /home filesystem needed recovery.

Problem was, my home filesystem backup was 3 1G files. The first 1GB file uncompressed and untarred just fine, second and third, nope. bzip2 checksum errors, to the point that tar nor cpio (using the input format option) could recover after I tried 'bzip2recover'.

I returned bzip2 to the above command stream, performed a new backup (after recovering as much as possible) and the split archives worked. I had assumed that pbzip2 would be a drop in replacement and I did not re-test my backups after (yes, I did test prior when using bzip2).

Just a word of warning for any others who may use this utility. My personal suspicion is there is something wrong around the 1G archive size, but I won't be using it again soon._________________...Lyall